A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.
Spectator columnist Kite turns some of her most wince-worthy experiences as a single woman into a humorous memoir, previously published in the U.K. as Real Life.
The author’s sometimes-rueful, sometimes-biting tone thwarts despair by turning every disaster into hilarious high drama. The book begins with Kite cancelling her wedding, underscoring how hard it is to find Mr. Right. She felt bad, of course, but she channeled her energy into the absurdities of dealing with “wedding-business” people who don’t believe in the phrase, “the wedding is off.” Even though her life was “in ruins,” the wedding gown vendor still wondered if she wanted to choose a different dress, as if that would change her mind. Working up to laugh-out-loud material, Kite writes of her “odd-job man” disappointments, including Tony, “a big, bearded man in his sixties,” possibly “the world’s most intellectual plumber” but clearly not the best man for the job, as he caused an “explosion of water” in her kitchen while repairing the boiler. Her dating life has been just as messy. A romance with a man who buys everything in groups of nine went sour when he insisted she line up her shoes just so. After more dating fiascoes, Kite sought help from a “relationship therapist” who charged £150 an hour and gave her leaflets with positive affirmations. Eager to have children but with no man in sight, the author investigated adoption, meeting a social worker who dashed her hopes with a series of Catch-22 questions. Readers might lose patience with Kite, a successful, well-educated, admittedly high-maintenance woman who has an exciting career in journalism and posh friends but is unable to manage her life, if she weren’t such a good writer and keen observer of human foibles, particularly her own. Even if we feel ambivalent about some of her choices, we can’t help but cheer her on.
A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250055149
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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